Luckily, it was the type of flash chip that I could use an external programmer and a test clip for. I haven't actually ever tried reading/writing through the internal programmer.
Had to reflash an SOIC i2c chip before and just soldered wires on. Some pins are easier where you have a via to solder to instead of the pin. Had to carefully lift the VCC pin to avoid turning on the whole board. Not all is lost if you break a pin: can carefully file down a bit of the plastic chip encapsulation to expose some pin to rebridge it once complete.
It's really nice to see how much cheaper ZIF sockets, test clips and programmers have gotten over the last few decades.
A process note. I did not really know what I was doing. and nothing was flashing correctly. Most of my problems ended up being with the cheap soic clip I had bought. After buying a nicer one it flashed first try. If anyone wants a recommendation, the nicer clip was from pomona electronics.
https://www.pomonaelectronics.com/products/test-clips/soic-c...
I can +1 for that clip. Had similar issues pulling data off a flash chip. If `flashrom` could see it at all, each read would come back with a different `sha1` hash.
Spent _way_ too long fighting that before I had the "wonder if this cheap clip is the issue..." thought. The pomona clip is so much better made and holds on to the chip well.